uh ohh..

[axis_d]

I'm not sure how serious this is, but i'm hoping somone can help me here. I have NO idea what happened. I was working on a video project on my computer yesterday, and I left my computer on when I walked away from it. I left everything on and even left the video editing program open. When i came back to it today, the computer was frozen, and I couldn't restart it, so I just had to press the "reset" button on my computer without shutting it down or anything.
Now, whenever it starts up, it wont boot completely. It says "a disk read error has occured, press cntrl +alt +del to restart" . which I do, but it never gets any better, it just does that everytime, I have no idea whats going on.
My computer has never touched the internet, I use it only for video editing, and I haven't installed anything new on it for months, so Im sure its not a virus. Also, there are no disks in the floppy drive, or either of my CD drives. hopefuly someone could help out cuz i'm getting a little nervous I have NO idea why it would do this out of nowhere.

[ktkendall]

Assuming WinXP here, you can boot from the xp cdrom and do a repair installation.. Just make the same choices you would make if you were installing fresh load of windows and it will ask you if you want to do a repair installation at one point. just choose yes there at that point and it should fix windows for you and not lose any of your data or programs.. I think you do loose any windows updates not on your copy of windows though..

[axis_d]

ok just tried repairing it with the windows XP disk ( home edition ). A couple things happened; First, when I just put the disk in, without going into BIOS to boot it from the CD-ROM, when the fast track controller was scanning it, It said this: "No drive attached to fast Track controller, the BIOS is not installed". Dont know if that means anything, but then it went through the BIOS scan and then went to this screen:

windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>\system32\hal.dll

please re-install a copy of the file above.


so, instead, i restarted the computer, this time going into BIOS to change the boot order, then when I went into set up Windows XP, it said:

An Error occured while set up was updating partition information on 117240 MB 0 at ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi [mbr]

setup cannot continue. To quit press F3

So I pressed F3, and it said " Windows XP was NOT installed. if there is a disk in the floppy drive remove it" (which there is no disk in the floppy)

so I restarted it, and tried it again, this time it said:
The partition is either too full, damaged, not formatted or formatted with an incompatible file system. To continue installing windows, set up must format this partition:
So then I tried booting it from the disk one more time, this time I pressed "R" to go to the recovery console, and it went to a command prompt, but all it said was, "The path or file specified is not valid ", and I dont really know what to do with that....So does this stuff help any? *crosses fingers*

[Carzy]

Sounds like it's an issue with the Hard Drive. When my old Hard Drive died, it made some clicking noises and froze everything. After I restarted, it never booted up anymore (just kept restarting after the Windows XP Logo).

Are you able to get into DOS? If you can, perhaps you could try:

C:\>chkdsk /f

[axis_d]

ok..i just ran chkdsk. after 25%, it said " the volume appears to have one or more unrecoverable problems. Then it just stops and goes back to the command prompt. I didn't type in chkdsk with the "/f" though... what are my options?

[kevinf]

yup if bios doesn't recognize it then its probably bad cable or drive

[axis_d]

so what are my choices as far as saving the data on the drive? is there anything else i can do to test it out?
This makes me mad though. How does this happen anyway? I took all the precautions to make sure this WOULDN'T happen. Thats the whole reason I never connected that computer to the internet, and the only files I ever put on there were video related. Nothing new was put on there, and I hadn't changed any settings, plus the drive was only about a year old. Well, thanks so far for the replies.

[Carzy]

ok..i just ran chkdsk. after 25%, it said " the volume appears to have one or more unrecoverable problems. Then it just stops and goes back to the command prompt. I didn't type in chkdsk with the "/f" though... what are my options?

/f attempts to repair the problems. If you only typed chkdsk then it will just do a scan. I can't guarantee that adding /f will make it reach 100%

[axis_d]

i tried it out with the /f command..it wouldn't recognize it.

[Gizmo]

The command you should be using is chkdsk /f. You can't type the /f switch on it's own. You need to type the command you're using the switch with.

[axis_d]

haha, right I know that. it didn't work.. It said it didn't recognize the command or something. I tried it several times to make sure I was typing it right.
So does anyone know ANYTHING i can try to get my files out of this hard drive before I throw it away? or anything else at all i can do to try to fix it?

[Cricket]

Did you replace the data cable yet?

:) Cricket

[axis_d]

no, I haven't tried that yet. Another thing someone else suggested to me was that I try hooking the HDD up to another computer as a slave, and it might recognize it and I could get my files. I dont know how to do this though, could anyone here explain to me how to do that? thanks!

[axis_d]

Anyone?? I need help on how to do this..

[Hags]

Well most of the time that you have unrecoverable errors on your hard disk you wouldnt be able to acess it from another pc anyways but you can try. What you would do to slave that HDD would be to get another pc, preferably with windows xp on it, open up the case and attach it to the second plug on the hdd ide cable, add power to the hdd that you are slaving then make sure the jumper, (the small black or white 2 pin plug on the back of the hard drive right next to the IDE connection) is configured to either slave (Sl) or cable select (CS) then power on the system. When it gets to the desktop go to MY Computer then open up your hdd, usually labeled with a J

[axis_d]

ok, thanks! I appreciate that. I'll try it tomorrow when I get home from work.